Gettysburg AddressExhibition Home

Abraham Lincoln was the second speaker on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg. Lincoln was preceded on the podium by the famed orator Edward Everett, who spoke to the crowd for two hours. Lincoln followed with his now immortal Gettysburg Address. On November 20, Everett wrote to Lincoln: “Permit me also to express my great admiration of the thoughts expressed by you, with such eloquent simplicity & appropriateness, at the consecration of the Cemetery. I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Of the five known manuscript copies of the Gettysburg Address, the Library of Congress has two. President Lincoln gave one of these to each of his two private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay. The other three copies of the Address were written by Lincoln for charitable purposes well after November 19. The copy for Edward Everett, the orator who spoke at Gettysburg for two hours prior to Lincoln, is at the Illinois State Historical Library in Springfield; the Bancroft copy, requested by historian George Bancroft, is at Cornell University in New York; the Bliss copy was made for Colonel Alexander Bliss, Bancroft's stepson, and is now in the Lincoln Room of the White House.

Drawn from the Library’s collections, the presentation that follows gathers the key documents linked to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Preservation Techniques for Original Drafts

In order to assure the long-term preservation of the two drafts of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in the Library of Congress collections, in the 1990s the Preservation Directorate commissioned the design and manufacture of two environmental cases, one for each document. In addition, the Library constructed a low temperature vault where these encasements and other Top Treasures of the Library are permanently stored.Read more